Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 450
Same platform, different organization
Adaptive Structuration Theory shows why identical platforms can produce different organizational consequences when users appropriate features, design intent, and local rules differently
Premise
A technology does not carry one fixed organizational effect from design into use. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) explains why the same platform can widen participation in one team, reinforce hierarchy in another, and become little more than storage in a third. Outcomes emerge from the encounter between structures offered by the technology and structures reproduced as people use it.
Adoption statistics can therefore hide the mechanism that matters. Two units may both report full deployment while attaching different informal rules to voting, access, visibility, or discussion. The diagnostic question is not only what the system permits. It is how users, managers, and existing routines are turning those possibilities into recurring social practice.
What the model is: Adaptive Structuration Theory in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainOrganization & Structure
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.